Cons
Display isn't full HD. Not the fastest gaming performance. Stereo speakers would have been better, given its size.

Bottom Line

The Samsung Galaxy Mega is both absurd and awesome. It has the largest screen of any smartphone in the U.S., and is a top Android-based pick on AT&T if you don't need the absolute latest cutting-edge components.

MOAR SCREEN!!! The Galaxy Mega ($149.99) is more than a bit ridiculous, thanks to its massive 6.3-inch screen—larger than any phone released in the U.S. Yet the sheer absurdity of this phone is kind of awesome, and it's a lot of fun to use. As a result, it's our new Editors' Choice for phablets on AT&T—bypassing the slightly more-powerful, but twice-the-price Galaxy Note II, thanks to the Mega's lower price, larger size, and little in the way of compromises otherwise. It's more phablet for less money. How can you go wrong?

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Design, Connectivity, and Call QualitySurprise! The Galaxy Mega is huge. It measures 6.6 by 3.46 by 0.31 inches (HWD) and weighs 7.02 ounces. Despite the larger size, it's a little lighter and thinner than the Galaxy Note II. The body is large enough that it completely fills my jeans pocket, and even sticks out a bit. I'm not going to rehash the whole plastic-versus-aluminum build, because everyone already knows where they stand on it. If an aluminum body is important, buy an HTC One or an iPhone 5; otherwise, this plastic-and-glass Samsung phone feels just fine, and the metallic gray pattern on the back lends some extra class to the design.

The 6.3-inch display is only 720p, which is a small disappointment considering its size. But even at 1,280-by-720, text and graphics still look good at 233ppi, if not as sharp as on the Galaxy Note II, which has a tighter pixel density thanks to its smaller panel. You'll notice the difference most in precisely two places: When reading full desktop Web sites zoomed out, where text can be slightly fuzzy, and when reading magazines or ebooks with a small font. Even in those cases, though, the 6.3-inch panel covers for a lot of sins, and makes all sorts of activities more fun than they are on a smaller phone.

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Below the screen is a physical Home button, with a Menu and Back capacitive buttons to the left and right, respectively. Typing on the on-screen keyboard is super-easy, in both portrait and landscape modes, and the extra row of number keys along the top is a big help.

The Galaxy Mega is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), quad-band HSPA+ 21 (850/900/1900/2100 MHz), and single-band 4G LTE device with 802.11ac Wi-Fi on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. There's an accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetic compass, luminance sensor, magnetometer, and proximity sensor built-in, and you also get NFC and Bluetooth 4.0. In midtown New York City, I saw LTE speeds of 9-11Mbps down and 7-10Mbps up, which is pretty standard given that AT&T's network is becoming more crowded these days.

Aside from the sheer difficulty in holding it up to your ear and getting your fingers around the width of the frame, the Galaxy Mega is a solid voice phone. Call sounded clear and rich through the earpiece, and I didn't have to position my head just so to hear the caller properly, either. My own voice sounded clear if somewhat computerized through the mic, and moving the handset up or down a bit to get the mic closer to my mouth didn't change the sound. Reception seems fine.

Calls sound clear through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset. Samsung's voice recognition software works well; I had no problem telling the phone to make calls over Bluetooth. The mono speakerphone sounds loud and clear, and is powerful enough to use outdoors. The huge 3,200mAh battery was good for a stellar 21 hours, 27 minutes of talk time; we're also running a video playback test as well to see how the big screen affects it and will report back as soon as we have a number.

Hardware, OS, and Apps The Galaxy Mega runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean out of the box, and packs a 1.7GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor and 1.5GB RAM. That's down a bit from the Galaxy Note II's quad-core Samsung Exynos processor and 2GB RAM. The difference isn't noticeable in day-to-day usage, as the Galaxy Mega feels fast. But it shows up in synthetic benchmarks, particularly those that hit the processor directly like integer performance. 3D performance also trails the Galaxy Note II, unfortunately both in synthetic benchmarks and in the real world. For example, Asphalt 7: Heat looks great and starts smoothly, but quickly becomes choppy with multiple computer-controlled cars on the screen.

Jamie Lendino is the managing editor of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was...

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